Do we need creative software engineers?
As a small company that’s recruiting hard, we’ve had the misfortune to have to deal with a few IT recruiters recently. This experience has reminded us of everything that’s paradoxical in this industry: institutions that suffocate the development of their software engineers yet crave these skills from the software engineering industry. We want to see an industry that nurtures the development of both problem-finders and problem-solvers, because without testers and developers who “get” creativity, digital innovation is dead in the water.
The IT recruitment industry is a farce. No matter how you dress it up, this is an industry that simply shouldn’t exist in any shape or form in 2014. IT recruiters are our own version of the telephone broker; pre-internet, a necessary evil, now a zombie industry clinging to an arcane business model.
The commoditisation of talent, the reductive function of keyword searching for “skills”, posting fake job ads to harvest new CVs from unsuspecting applicants where the IT professional is routinely referred to as “resource” does more harm to the industry than we can imagine. Temporarily assembling staff around “projects” (for as much commission as the recruiter can negotiate) leaves technology professionals with no opportunity to demonstrate commitment to (or even an understanding of) organisational goals and values, and reduces the few permanent staff working with them to task-managers, to instruction givers.
The classic management theory handbook attempts to offer some justification for this approach. After all, most traditional management models assert the rationalisation and reduction of as much activity as possible in order to try to convert the complicated in to the simple. The same approach also explains cost-cutting, offshoring, commoditising of IT service and a whole bunch of other “great” organisational strategies.
Everything Should Be Made as Simple as Possible, But Not Simpler.
But of course, it isn’t that simple. The greybeards of the IT industry know of the huge disparity between great talent and those that have merely an understanding of such skills; practitioners vs. those who merely have good CV writing skills. This disparity is rarely understood by keyword searches and recruiters with little or no understanding of the industry they attempt to service. We look to assemble high-performing teams but often in corporate IT environments the success or failure of your “project” is determined by maybe just a few key members of the team. What is it that makes these people so valuable?
Now more than ever, programmes and products are funded and motivated not by the desire to do the “well-understood” more efficiently or even to make the “complicated” in to the “simple”. Instead they are motivated by the need to innovate, to create and ideate the new, the not yet understood, to solve new business problems. To achieve this we need highly creative talent; we need skills that aren’t learnt in the classroom or at least, ones that can’t simply be proven by certificates. Innovation needs collaboration, team work, communication, curiosity. It demands cognitive reasoning, lateral thinking and pattern-matching analytical skills, problem finding skills as well as problem solving skills. These skills are learnt in the trenches, inside performing teams, from stable, consistent, long-term relationships with mentors and coaches who are skilled and practiced in such disciplines. Creative talent is a learnt ability, nurtured, valued, lived and breathed.
Software engineering is both a science and an art in equal measures.
Few recruiters (if any) or organisations know how to measure these skills, understand or can even recognise them, because few organisations demand creativity and innovation skills from their software engineers. Organisations want problems solved, not sought out. But to innovate, to build high-performing creative teams, to make sense of the new, these skills are non-negotiable.
